Antoine Beaupr : Remote presence tools for social distancing

As a technologist, I've been wondering how I can help people with the rapidly spreading coronavirus pandemic. With the world entering the "exponential stage" (e.g. Canada, the USA and basically all of Europe), everyone should take precautions and limit practice Social Distancing (and not dumbfuckery). But this doesn't mean we should dig ourselves in a hole in our basement: we can still talk to each other on the internet, and there are great, and free, tools available to do this. As part of my work as a sysadmin, I've had to answer questions about this a few times and I figured it was useful to share this more publicly.

Just say hi using whatever First off, feel free to use the normal tools you normally use: Signal, Facetime, Skype, Zoom, and Discord can be fine to connect with your folks, and since it doesn't take much to make someone's day please do use those tools to call your close ones and say "hi". People, especially your older folks, will feel alone and maybe scared in those crazy times. Every little bit you can do will help, even if it's just a normal phone call, an impromptu balcony fanfare, a remote workout class, or just a sing-along from your balcony, anything goes. But if those tools don't work well for some reason, or you want to try something new, or someone doesn't have an iPad, or it's too dang cold to go on your balcony, you should know there are other alternatives that you can use.

Jitsi We've been suggesting our folks use a tool called "Jitsi". Jitsi is a free software platform to host audio/video conferences. It has a web app which means anyone with a web browser can join a session. It can also do "screen sharing" if you need to work together on a project. There are many "instances", but here's a subset I know about:

https://meet.jitsi.org/ - the official one, might overload

https://meet.mayfirst.org/ - Mayfirst non-profit cooperative, hosted in New York (see also their usage instructions)

https://meet.greenhost.net/ - Greenhost, hosted in the Netherlands

https://framatalk.org/ - Framasoft, a popular education network, hosted in France - note that Framasoft is struggling under load as basically everyone in France (including the public education network) seems to think they can all run on their servers all at once, they encourage you to run your own instance instead of using theirs

another list of instances

You can connect to those with your web browser directly. If your web browser doesn't work, try switching to another (e.g. if Firefox doesn't work, try Chrome and vice-versa). There are also apps for desktop and mobile apps (F-Droid, Google Play, Apple Store) that will work better than just using your browser. Jitsi should scale for small meetings up to a dozen people.

Mumble ... but beyond that, you might have trouble doing a full video-conference with a lot of people anyways. If you need to have a large conference with a lot of people, or if you have bandwidth and reliability problems with Jitsi, you can also try Mumble. Mumble is an audio-only conferencing service, similar to Discord or Teamspeak, but made with free software. It requires users to install an app but there are clients for every platform out there (F-Droid, Google Play, Apple Store). Mumble is harder to setup, but is much more efficient in terms of bandwidth and latency. In other words, it will just scale and sound better. Mumble ships with a list of known servers, but you can also connect to those trusted ones:

`mumble.mayfirst.org` - Mayfirst (see also their instructions on how to use it, hosted in New York city

`mumble.riseup.net` - Riseup, an autonomous collective, hosted in Seattle (ask me if you need their password) not a public service

`talk.systemli.org` - systemli, a left-wing network and technics-collective, hosted in Berlin

Live streaming If for some reason those tools still don't scale, you might have a bigger problem on your hands. If your audience is over 100 people, you will not be able to all join in the same conference together. And besides, maybe you just want to broadcast some news and do not need audio or video feedback from the audience. In this case, you need "live streaming". Here, proprietary services are Twitch, Livestream.com and Youtube. But the community also provides alternatives to those. This is more complicated to setup, but just to get you started, I'll link to:

https://live.mayfirst.org/ - Mayfirst, based on Icecast and icecream, a web-based client, unfortunately non-free

https://live.autistici.org/ - Autistici, an autonomous collective, hosted in Italy, based on Nginx and RTMP

For either of those tools, you need an app on your desktop. The Mayfirst instructions use OBS Studio for this, but it might be possible to hotwire VLC to stream video from your computer as well.

Text chat When all else fails, text should go through. Slack, Twitter and Facebook are the best known alternatives here, obviously. I would warn against spending too much time on those, as they can foment harmful rumors and can spread bullshit like a virus on any given day. The situation does not make that any better. But it can be a good way to keep in touch with your loved ones. But if you want to have a large meetings with a crazy number of people, text can actually accomplish wonders. Internet Relay Chat also known as "IRC" (and which oldies might have experienced for a bit as mIRC) is, incredibly, still alive at the venerable age of 30 years old. It is mainly used by free software projects, but can be used by anyone. Here are some networks you can try:

http://webchat.freenode.net/ - the largest network, Freenode

https://webchat.oftc.net/ - smaller network, used by the Debian oftc.net/)

http://irc.indymedia.org/ - a relic of the almost defunct Indymedia network which I help operate

Those are all web interface to the IRC networks, but there are also a plenitude of IRC apps you can install on your desktop if you want the full experience.

Whiteboards and screensharing I decided to add this section later on because it's a frequently mentioned "oh but you forgot..." comment I get from this post.

Big Blue Button - seems to check all the boxes: free software, VoIP integration, whiteboarding and screen sharing, works from a web browser

CodiMD: collaborative text editor with UML and diagrams support

Excalidraw: (collaborative) whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel

I'll also mention that collaborative editors, in general, like Etherpad are just great for taking minutes because you don't have that single person with the load of writing down what people are saying and is too busy to talk. Google Docs and Nextcloud have similar functionality, of course. Update, public Big Blue Button instances:

https://bbb.jitsi.rocks/ - also a Jitsi redirector, https://jitsi.rocks/

BBB requires one user to register to start the conference, but once that's done, anyone with the secret URL can join.

Common recommendations Regardless of the tools you pick, audio and video streaming is a technical challenge. A lot of things happen under the hood when you pick up your phone and dial a number, and sometimes using a desktop, it can be difficult to get everything "just right". Some advice:

get a good microphone and headset: good audio really makes a difference in how pleasing the experience will be, both for you and your peers. good hardware will reduce echo, feedback and other audio problems. (see also my audio docs)

check your audio/video setup before joining the meeting, ideally with another participant on the same platform you will use

find a quiet place to meet: even a good microphone will pick up noises from the environment, if you reduce this up front, everything will sound better. if you do live streaming and want high quality recording, considering setting up a smaller room to do recording. (tip: i heard of at least one journalist hiding in a closer full of clothes to make recordings, as it dampens the sound!)

mute your microphone when you are not speaking (`spacebar` in Jitsi, follow the "audio wizard" in Mumble)

If you have questions or need help, feel free to ask! Comment on this blog or just drop me an email (see contact), I'd be happy to answer your questions.

Other ideas Inevitably, when I write a post like this, someone writes something like "I can't believe you did not mention APL!" Here's a list of tools I have not mentioned here, deliberately or because I forgot:

Nextcloud Talk - needs access to a special server, but can be used for small meetings (less than 5, or so i heard)

Jabber/XMPP - yes, I know, XMPP can do everything and it's magic. but I've given up a while back, and I don't think setting up audio conferences with multiple enough is easy enough to make the cut here

Signal - signal is great. i use it every day. it's the primary way I do long distance, international voice calls for free, and the only way I do video-conferencing with family and friends at all. but it's one to one only, and the group (text) chat kind of sucks

Also, all the tools I recommend above are made of free software, which means they can be self-hosted. If things go bad and all those services stop existing, it should be possible for you to run your own instance. Let me know if I forgot anything, but in a friendly way. And stay safe out there. Update: a similar article from the good folks at systemli also recommends Mastodon, Ticker, Wikis and Etherpad. Update 2: same, at SFC, which also mentions Firefox Send and Etherpad (and now I wish I did).

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: DebConf Videoteam sprint report - day 0

First day of the videoteam autumn sprint! Well, I say first day, but in reality it's more day 0. Even though most of us have arrived in Cambridge already, we are still missing a few people. Last year we decided to sprint in Paris because most of our video gear is stocked there. This year, we instead chose to sprint a few days before the Cambridge Mini-Debconf to help record the conference afterwards. Since some of us arrived very late and the ones who did arrive early are still mostly jet lagged (that includes me), I'll use this post to introduce the space we'll be working from this week and our general plan for the sprint. House Party After some deliberations, we decided to rent a house for a week in Cambridge: finding a work space to accommodate us and all our gear proved difficult and we decided mixing accommodation and work would be a good idea. I've only been here for a few hours, but I have to say I'm pretty impressed by the airbnb we got. Last time I checked (it seems every time I do, some new room magically appears), I counted 5 bedrooms, 6 beds, 5 toilets and 3 shower rooms. Heck, there's even a solarium and a training room with weights and a punching bag on the first floor. Having a whole house to ourselves also means we have access to a functional kitchen. I'd really like to cook at least a few meals during the week. There's also a cat!

Picture of a black cat I took from Wikipedia. It was too dark outside to use mine

It's not the house's cat per say, but it's been hanging out around the house for most of the day and makes cute faces trying to convince us to let it come inside. Nice try cat. Nice try. Here are some glamour professional photos of what the place looks like on a perfect summer day, just for the kick of it: The view from the garden

Of course, reality has trouble matching all the post-processing filters. Plan for the week Now on a more serious note; apart from enjoying the beautiful city of Cambridge, here's what the team plans to do this week: tumbleweed Stefano wants to continue refactoring our ansible setup. A lot of things have been added in the last year, but some of it are hacks we should remove and implement correctly. highvoltage Jonathan won't be able to come to Cambridge, but plans to work remotely, mainly on our desktop/xfce session implementation. Another pile of hacks waiting to be cleaned! ivodd Ivo has been working a lot of the pre-ansible part of our installation and plans to continue working on that. At the moment, creating an installation USB key is pretty complicated and he wants to make that simpler. olasd Nicolas completely reimplemented our streaming setup for DC17 and wants to continue working on that. More specifically, he wants to write scripts to automatically setup and teardown - via API calls - the distributed streaming network we now use. Finding a way to push TLS certificates to those mirrors, adding a live stream viewer on video.debconf.org and adding a viewer to our archive are also things he wants to look at. pollo For my part, I plan to catch up with all the commits in our ansible repository I missed since last year's sprint and work on documentation. It would be very nice if we could have a static website describing our work so that others (at mini-debconfs for examples) could replicate it easily. If I have time, I'll also try to document all the ansible roles we have written. Stay tuned for more daily reports!

Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo: Software Freedom Strategy with Community Projects

It's been some time since I last wrote. Life and work have been busy. At the same time, the world has been busy, and as I would love to write a larger post, I will try to be short here. I would love to touch on the Librem 5 and postmarketOS. In fact, I had, in a podcast in Portuguese, Papo Livre. Maybe, I'll touch a little on the latter. Some of the inspiration for this post include:

Bradley Kuhn's Copyleft for the next decade
His previous talk Future of Copyleft
Alexandre Oliva's The Singularity, the Matrix and the Terminator
Requiem for the American Dream (sorry about this one not being easily available without DRM)
My own talk about Copyleft at FISL17, in portuguese
John Sullivan's Increasingly Permissive or Increasingly Dismissive?

All of those led me to understand how software freedom is under attack, in particular how copyleft in under attack. And, as I talked during FISL, though many might say that "Open Source has won", end users software freedom has not. Lots of companies have co-opted "free software" but give no software freedom to their users. They seem friends with free software, and they are. Because they want software to be free. But freedom should not be a value for software itself, it needs to be a value for people, not only companies or people who are labeled software developers, but all people. That's why I want to stop talking about free software, and talk more about software freedom. Because I believe the latter is more clear about what we are talking about. I don't mind that we use whatever label, as long as we stablish its meaning during conversations, and set the tone to distinguish them. The thing is: free software does not software freedom make. Not by itself. As Bradley Kuhn puts it: it's not magic pixie dust. Those who have known me for years might remember me as a person who studied free software licenses and how I valued copyleft, the GPL specifically, and how I concerned myself with topics like license compatibility and other licensing matters. Others might remember me as a person who valued a lot about upstreaming code. Not carrying changes to software openly developed that you had not made an effort to put upstream. I can't say I was wrong on both accounts. I still believe in those things. I still believe in the importance of copyleft and the GPL. I still value sharing your code in the commons by going upstream. But I was certaily wrong in valuing them too much. Or not giving as much or even more value to distribution efforts of getting software freedom to the users. And it took me a while in seeing how many people also saw the GPL as a tool to get code upstream. You see that a lot in Linus' discourse about the GPL. And that is on the minds of a lot of people, who I have seen argue that copyleft is not necessary for companies to contribute code back. But that's the problem. The point is not about getting code upstream. But about assuring people have the freedom to run a modified version of the software they received on their computers. It turns out that many examples of companies who had contributed code upstream, have not delivered that freedom to their end-users, who had received a modified version of that same software, which is not free. Bradley Kuhn also alerts us that many companies have been replacing copyleft software with non-copyleft software. And I completely agree with him that we should be writing more copyleft software that we hold copyright for, so we can enforce it. But looking at what has been happening recently in the Linux community about enforcement, even thought I still believe in enforcement as an strategy, I think we need much more than that. And one of those strategies is delivering more free software that users may be able to install on their own computers. It's building those replacements for software that people have been using for any reason. Be it the OS they get when they buy a device, or the application they use for communication. It's not like the community is not doing it, it's just that we need to acknowledge that this is a necessary strategy to guarantee software freedom. That distribution of software that users may easily install on their computers is as much or even more valuable than developing software closer to the hacker/developer community. That doing downstream changes to free software in the effort of getting them to users is worth it. That maintaining that software stable and secure for users is a very important task. I may be biased when talking about that, as I have been shifting from doing upstream work to downstream work and both on the recent years. But maybe that's what I needed to realize that upstreaming does not necessarily guarantees that users will get software freedom. I believe we need to talk more about that. I have seen many people dear to me disregard that difference between the freedom of the user and the freedom of software. There is much more to talk about that, go into detail about some of those points, and I think we need to debate more. I am subscribed to the libreplanet-discuss mailing list. Come join us in discussing about software freedom there, if you want to comment on anything I brought up here. As I promised I would, I would like to mention about postmarketOS, which is an option users have now to get some software freedom on some mobile devices. It's an effort I wanted to build myself, and I applaud the community that has developed around it and has been moving forward so quickly. And it's a good example of a balance between upstream and dowstream code that gets to deliver a better level of software freedom to users than the vendor ever would. I wanted to write about much of the topics I brought up today, but postponed that for some time. I was motivated by recent events in the community, and I am really disappointed at some the free software players and some of the events that happened in the last few years. That got me into thinking in how we need to manifest ourselves about those issues, so people know how we feel. So here it is: I am disappointed at how the Linux Foundation handled the situation about Software Freedom Conversancy taking a case against VMWare; I am disappointed about how Software Freedom Law Center handled a trademark issue against the Software Freedom Conservancy; and I really appreciate all the work the Software Freedom Conservancy has been doing. I have supported them for the last two years, and I urge you to become a supporter too.

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Migrating my website to Pelican

After too much time lying to myself, telling myself things like "I'll just add this neat feature I want on my blog next week", I've finally made the big jump, ditched django and migrated my website to Pelican. I'm going to the Cambridge Mini-Debconf at the end of the month for the Debconf Videoteam Autumn sprint and I've taken the task of making daily sprint reports for the team. That in return means I have to publish my blog on Planet Debian. My old website not having feeds made this a little hard and this perfect storm gave me the energy to make the migration happen. Anyway, django was fun. Building a (crappy) custom blogging engine with it taught me some rough basics, but honestly I don't know why I ever thought it was a good idea. Don't get me wrong: django is great and should definitely be used for large and complicated websites. My blog just ain't one. Migrating to Pelican was pretty easy since it also uses Jinja2 templates and generates content from Mardown. The hardest part was actually bending it to replicate the weird and specific behavior I wanted it to have. So yeah, woooo, I migrated to Pelican. Who cares, right? Well, if you are amongst the very, very few people who read the blog posts I mainly write for myself, you'll be please to know that:

Tags are now implemented
You can subscribe to a wide array of ATOM feeds to follow my blog

Here's a bonus picture of a Pelican from Wikimedia, just for the sake of it:

Petter Reinholdtsen: Some notes on fault tolerant storage systems

If you care about how fault tolerant your storage is, you might find these articles and papers interesting. They have formed how I think of when designing a storage system.

USENIX :login; Redundancy Does Not Imply Fault Tolerance. Analysis of Distributed Storage Reactions to Single Errors and Corruptions by Aishwarya Ganesan, Ramnatthan Alagappan, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau
ZDNet Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009 by Robin Harris
ZDNet Why RAID 6 stops working in 2019 by Robin Harris
USENIX FAST'07 Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population by Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz Andre Barroso
USENIX ;login: Data Integrity. Finding Truth in a World of Guesses and Lies by Doug Hughes
USENIX FAST'08 An Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack by L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, B. Schroeder, A. C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau
USENIX FAST'07 Disk failures in the real world: what does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you? by B. Schroeder and G. A. Gibson.
USENIX ;login: Are Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures? A Comprehensive Study of Storage Subsystem Failure Characteristics by Weihang Jiang, Chongfeng Hu, Yuanyuan Zhou, and Arkady Kanevsky
SIGMETRICS 2007 An analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives by L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, S. Pasupathy, and J. Schindler

Several of these research papers are based on data collected from hundred thousands or millions of disk, and their findings are eye opening. The short story is simply do not implicitly trust RAID or redundant storage systems. Details matter. And unfortunately there are few options on Linux addressing all the identified issues. Both ZFS and Btrfs are doing a fairly good job, but have legal and practical issues on their own. I wonder how cluster file systems like Ceph do in this regard. After all, there is an old saying, you know you have a distributed system when the crash of a compyter you have never heard of stops you from getting any work done. The same holds true if fault tolerance do not work. Just remember, in the end, it do not matter how redundant, or how fault tolerant your storage is, if you do not continuously monitor its status to detect and replace failed disks.

Russ Allbery: Bundle haul

Confession time: I started making these posts (eons ago) because a close friend did as well, and I enjoyed reading them. But the main reason why I continue is because the primary way I have to keep track of the books I've bought and avoid duplicates is, well, grep on these posts. I should come up with a non-bullshit way of doing this, but time to do more elegant things is in short supply, and, well, it's my blog. So I'm boring all of you who read this in various places with my internal bookkeeping. I do try to at least add a bit of commentary. This one will be more tedious than most since it includes five separate Humble Bundles, which increases the volume a lot. (I just realized I'd forgotten to record those purchases from the past several months.) First, the individual books I bought directly: Ilona Andrews Sweep in Peace (sff)
Ilona Andrews One Fell Sweep (sff)
Steven Brust Vallista (sff)
Nicky Drayden The Prey of Gods (sff)
Meg Elison The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (sff)
Pat Green Night Moves (nonfiction)
Ann Leckie Provenance (sff)
Seanan McGuire Once Broken Faith (sff)
Seanan McGuire The Brightest Fell (sff)
K. Arsenault Rivera The Tiger's Daughter (sff)
Matthew Walker Why We Sleep (nonfiction)
Some new books by favorite authors, a few new releases I heard good things about, and two (Night Moves and Why We Sleep) from references in on-line articles that impressed me. The books from security bundles (this is mostly work reading, assuming I'll get to any of it), including a blockchain bundle: Wil Allsop Unauthorised Access (nonfiction)
Ross Anderson Security Engineering (nonfiction)
Chris Anley, et al. The Shellcoder's Handbook (nonfiction)
Conrad Barsky & Chris Wilmer Bitcoin for the Befuddled (nonfiction)
Imran Bashir Mastering Blockchain (nonfiction)
Richard Bejtlich The Practice of Network Security (nonfiction)
Kariappa Bheemaiah The Blockchain Alternative (nonfiction)
Violet Blue Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy (nonfiction)
Richard Caetano Learning Bitcoin (nonfiction)
Nick Cano Game Hacking (nonfiction)
Bruce Dang, et al. Practical Reverse Engineering (nonfiction)
Chris Dannen Introducing Ethereum and Solidity (nonfiction)
Daniel Drescher Blockchain Basics (nonfiction)
Chris Eagle The IDA Pro Book, 2nd Edition (nonfiction)
Nikolay Elenkov Android Security Internals (nonfiction)
Jon Erickson Hacking, 2nd Edition (nonfiction)
Pedro Franco Understanding Bitcoin (nonfiction)
Christopher Hadnagy Social Engineering (nonfiction)
Peter N.M. Hansteen The Book of PF (nonfiction)
Brian Kelly The Bitcoin Big Bang (nonfiction)
David Kennedy, et al. Metasploit (nonfiction)
Manul Laphroaig (ed.) PoC GTFO (nonfiction)
Michael Hale Ligh, et al. The Art of Memory Forensics (nonfiction)
Michael Hale Ligh, et al. Malware Analyst's Cookbook (nonfiction)
Michael W. Lucas Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition (nonfiction)
Bruce Nikkel Practical Forensic Imaging (nonfiction)
Sean-Philip Oriyano CEHv9 (nonfiction)
Kevin D. Mitnick The Art of Deception (nonfiction)
Narayan Prusty Building Blockchain Projects (nonfiction)
Prypto Bitcoin for Dummies (nonfiction)
Chris Sanders Practical Packet Analysis, 3rd Edition (nonfiction)
Bruce Schneier Applied Cryptography (nonfiction)
Adam Shostack Threat Modeling (nonfiction)
Craig Smith The Car Hacker's Handbook (nonfiction)
Dafydd Stuttard & Marcus Pinto The Web Application Hacker's Handbook (nonfiction)
Albert Szmigielski Bitcoin Essentials (nonfiction)
David Thiel iOS Application Security (nonfiction)
Georgia Weidman Penetration Testing (nonfiction)
Finally, the two SF bundles: Buzz Aldrin & John Barnes Encounter with Tiber (sff)
Poul Anderson Orion Shall Rise (sff)
Greg Bear The Forge of God (sff)
Octavia E. Butler Dawn (sff)
William C. Dietz Steelheart (sff)
J.L. Doty A Choice of Treasons (sff)
Harlan Ellison The City on the Edge of Forever (sff)
Toh Enjoe Self-Reference ENGINE (sff)
David Feintuch Midshipman's Hope (sff)
Alan Dean Foster Icerigger (sff)
Alan Dean Foster Mission to Moulokin (sff)
Alan Dean Foster The Deluge Drivers (sff)
Taiyo Fujii Orbital Cloud (sff)
Hideo Furukawa Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (sff)
Haikasoru (ed.) Saiensu Fikushon 2016 (sff anthology)
Joe Haldeman All My Sins Remembered (sff)
Jyouji Hayashi The Ouroboros Wave (sff)
Sergei Lukyanenko The Genome (sff)
Chohei Kambayashi Good Luck, Yukikaze (sff)
Chohei Kambayashi Yukikaze (sff)
Sakyo Komatsu Virus (sff)
Miyuki Miyabe The Book of Heroes (sff)
Kazuki Sakuraba Red Girls (sff)
Robert Silverberg Across a Billion Years (sff)
Allen Steele Orbital Decay (sff)
Bruce Sterling Schismatrix Plus (sff)
Michael Swanwick Vacuum Flowers (sff)
Yoshiki Tanaka Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 1: Dawn (sff)
Yoshiki Tanaka Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 2: Ambition (sff)
Yoshiki Tanaka Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 3: Endurance (sff)
Tow Ubukata Mardock Scramble (sff)
Sayuri Ueda The Cage of Zeus (sff)
Sean Williams & Shane Dix Echoes of Earth (sff)
Hiroshi Yamamoto MM9 (sff)
Timothy Zahn Blackcollar (sff)
Phew. Okay, all caught up, and hopefully won't have to dump something like this again in the near future. Also, more books than I have any actual time to read, but what else is new.

Yves-Alexis Perez: OpenPGP smartcard transition (part 1)

A long time ago, I switched my GnuPG setup to a smartcard based one. I kept using the same master key, but:

copied the rsa4096 master key to a master smartcard, for when I need to sign (certify) other keys;
created rsa2048 subkeys (for signature, encryption and authentication) and moved them to an OpenPGP smartcard for daily usage.

I've been working with that setup for a few years now and it is working perfectly fine. The signature counter on the OpenPGP basic card is a bit north of 5000 which is large but not that huge, all considered (and not counting authentication and decryption key usage).

One very nice feature of using a smartcard is that my laptop (or other machines I work on) never manipulates the private key directly but only sends request to the card, which is a really huge improvement, in my opinion. But it's also not the perfect solution for me: the OpenPGP card uses a proprietary platform from ZeitControl, named BasicCard. We have very few information on the smartcard, besides the fact that Werner Koch trust ZeistControl to not mess up. One caveat for me is that the card does not use a certified secure microcontroler like you would find in smartcard chips found in debit card or electronic IDs. That means it's not really been audited by a competent hardware lab, and thus can't be considered secure against physical attacks. The cardOS software and the application implementing the OpenPGP specification are not public either and have not been audited either, to the best of my knowledge.

At one point I was interested in the Yubikey Neo, especially since the architecture Yubico used was common: a (supposedly) certified platform (secure microcontroler, card OS) and a GlobalPlatform / JavaCard virtual machine. The applet used in the Yubikey Neo is open-source, too, so you could take a look at it and identify any issue.

Unfortunately, Yubico transitioned to a less common and more proprietary infrastructure for Yubikey 4: it's not longer Javacard based, and they don't provide the applet source anymore. This was not really seen as a good move by a lot of people, including Konstantin Ryabitsev (kernel.org administrator). Also, it wasn't possible even for the Yubico Neo to actually build the applet yourself and inject it on the card: when the Yubikey leaves the facility, the applet is already installed and the smartcard is locked (for obvious security reason). I've tried asking about getting naked/empty Yubikey with developers keys to load the applet myself, but it' was apparently not possible or would have required signing an NDA with NXP (the chip maker), which is not really possible as an individual (not that I really want to anyway).

In the meantime, a coworker actually wrote an OpenPGP javacard applet, with the intention to support latest version of the OpenPGP specification, and especially elliptic curve cryptography. The applet is called SmartPGP and has been released on ANSSI github repository. I investigated a bit, and found a smartcard with correct specification: certified (in France or Germany), and supporting Javacard 3.0.4 (required for ECC). The card can do RSA2048 (unfortunately not RSA4096) and EC with NIST (secp256r1, secp384r1, secp521r1) and Brainpool (P256, P384, P512) curves.

I've ordered some cards, and when they arrived started playing. I've built the SmartPGP applet and pushed it to a smartcard, then generated some keys and tried with GnuPG. I'm right now in the process of migrating to a new smartcard based on that setup, which seems to work just fine after few days.

Part two of this serie will describe how to build the applet and inject it in the smartcard. The process is already documented here and there, but there are few things not to forget, like how to lock the card after provisionning, so I guess having the complete process somewhere might be useful in case some people want to reproduce it.

Ricardo Mones: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?

One of the reasons which made me switch my old 17" BenQ monitor for a Dell U2413 three years ago was it had an integrated SD card reader. I find very convenient to take camera's card out, plug the card into the monitor and click on KDE device monitor's option Open with digiKam to download the photos or videos.

But last week, when trying to reconnect the USB cable to the new board just didn't work and the kernel log messages were not very hopeful:

[190231.770349] usb 2-2.3.3: new SuperSpeed USB device number 15 using xhci_hcd
[190231.890439] usb 2-2.3.3: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=0307
[190231.890444] usb 2-2.3.3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[190231.890446] usb 2-2.3.3: Product: USB3.0 Card Reader
[190231.890449] usb 2-2.3.3: Manufacturer: Realtek
[190231.890451] usb 2-2.3.3: SerialNumber: F141000037E1
[190231.896592] usb-storage 2-2.3.3:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[190231.896764] scsi host8: usb-storage 2-2.3.3:1.0
[190232.931861] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Generic- SD/MMC/MS/MSPRO  1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[190232.933902] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0
[190232.937989] sd 8:0:0:0: [sde] Attached SCSI removable disk
[190243.069680] hub 2-2.3:1.0: hub_ext_port_status failed (err = -71)
[190243.070037] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.070410] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.070660] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.071035] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.071409] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.071413] usb 2-2.3-port3: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
...

I was sure USB 3.0 ports were working, because I've already used them with a USB 3.0 drive, so first thought was the monitor USB hub had failed. It seemed unlikely that a cable which has not been moved in 3 years was suddenly failing, is that even possible?

But a few moments later the same cable plugged into a USB 2.0 worked flawlessly and all photos could be downloaded, just noticeably slower.

A bit confused, and thinking that, since everything else was working maybe the cable had to be replaced, it happened I upgraded the system in the meantime. And luck came into rescue, because now it works again in 4.9.30-2+deb9u5 kernel. Looking at the package changelog it seems the fix was this usb:xhci:Fix regression when ATI chipsets detected . So, not a bad cable but a little kernel bug ;-)

Thanks to all involved, specially Ben for the package update!

Enrico Zini: Systemd socket units

These are the notes of a training course on systemd I gave as part of my work with Truelite. .socket units Socket units tell systemd to listen on a given IPC, network socket, or file system FIFO, and use another unit to service requests to it. For example, this creates a network service that listens on port 55555:

# /etc/systemd/system/ddate.socket
[Unit]
Description=ddate service on port 55555
[Socket]
ListenStream=55555
Accept=true
[Install]
WantedBy=sockets.target

# /etc/systemd/system/ddate@.service
[Unit]
Description=Run ddate as a network service
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/bin/sh -ec 'while true; do /usr/bin/ddate; sleep 1m; done'
StandardOutput=socket
StandardError=journal

Note that the .service file is called ddate@ instead of ddate: units whose name ends in '@' are template units which can be activated multiple times, by adding any string after the '@' in the unit name. If I run nc localhost 55555 a couple of times, and then check the list of running units, I see ddate@ instantiated twice, adding the local and remote socket endpoints to the unit name:

$ systemctl list-units 'ddate@*'
  UNIT                                             LOAD   ACTIVE SUB     DESCRIPTION
  ddate@15-127.0.0.1:55555-127.0.0.1:36936.service loaded active running Run ddate as a network service (127.0.0.1:36936)
  ddate@16-127.0.0.1:55555-127.0.0.1:37002.service loaded active running Run ddate as a network service (127.0.0.1:37002)

This allows me to monitor each running service individually. systemd also automatically creates a slice unit called system-ddate.slice grouping all services together:

$ systemctl status system-ddate.slice
  system-ddate.slice
   Loaded: loaded
   Active: active since Thu 2017-09-21 14:25:02 CEST; 9min ago
    Tasks: 4
   CGroup: /system.slice/system-ddate.slice
            ddate@15-127.0.0.1:55555-127.0.0.1:36936.service
              18214 /bin/sh -ec while true; do /usr/bin/ddate; sleep 1m; done
              18661 sleep 1m
            ddate@16-127.0.0.1:55555-127.0.0.1:37002.service
              18228 /bin/sh -ec while true; do /usr/bin/ddate; sleep 1m; done
              18670 sleep 1m

This allows to also work with all running services for this template unit as a whole, sending a signal to all their processes and setting up resource control features for the service as a whole. See:

Ricardo Mones: Long time no post

Seems the breakage of my desktop computer more than 3 months ago did also caused also a hiatus on my online publishing activities... it was not really intended, it happened I was just busy with other things _ .

With a broken computer being able to build software on the laptop became a priority. Around September 2016 or so the good'n'old black MacBook decided to stop working. I didn't really need a replacement by that time, but never liked to have just a single working system, and in October just found an offer which I could not resist and bought a ThinkPad X260. It helped to build my final project (it was faster than the desktop), but lacking time for FOSS hadn't used it for much more.

Setting up the laptop for software (Debian packages and Claws Mail, mainly) was somewhat easy. Finding a replacement for the broken desktop was a bit more difficult. I considered a lot of configurations and prices, from those new Ryzen to just buying the same components (pretty difficult now because they're discontinued). In the end, I decided to spend the minimum and make good use of everything else still working (memory, discs and wireless card), so I finally got an AMD A10-7860K on top of an Asus A88M-PLUS. This board has more SATA ports, so I added an unused SSD, remains of a broken laptop, to install the new system Debian Stretch, of course while keeping the existing software RAID partitions of the spinning drives.

The last thing distracting from the usual routine was replacing the car. Our child is growing as expected and the Fiesta was starting to appear small and uncomfortable, specially for long distance travel. We went for an hybrid model, with a high capacity boot. Given our budget, we only found 3 models below the limit: Kia Niro, Hyundai Ioniq and Toyota Auris TS. The color was decided by the kid (after forbidding black), and this was the winner...

In the middle of all of this we also took some vacation to travel to the south of Galicia, mostly around Vigo area, but also visiting Oporto and other nice places.

Ross Gammon: My Debian & Ubuntu work from April to mid-August 2017

Okay, so I have been slack with my blogging again. I have been travelling around Europe with work quite a bit, had a short holiday over Easter in Denmark, and also had 3 weeks of Summer Holiday in Germany. Debian

Tidied up the packaging and tried building the latest version of libdrumstick, but tests had been added to the package by upstream which were failing. I still need to get back and investigate that.
Updated node-seq (targeted at experimental due to the Debian Stretch release freeze) and asked for sponsorship (as I did not have DM rights for it yet).
Uploaded the latest version of abcmidi (also to experimental), and again.
Updated node-tmp to the latest version and uploaded to experimental.
Worked some more on bluebird RFP, but getting errors when running tests. I still haven t gone back to investigate that.
Updated node-coffeeify to the latest version and uploaded to experimental.
Uploaded the latest version of node-os-tmpdir (also to experimental).
Uploaded the latest version of node-concat-stream (also to experimental).
After encouragement from several Debian Developers, I applied to become a full Debian Developer. Over the summer months I worked with Santiago as my Application Manager and answered questions about working in the Debian Project.
A web vulnerability was identified in node-concat-stream, so I prepared a fix to the version in unstable, uploaded it to unstable, and submitted a unblock request bug so that it would be fixed in the coming Debian Stretch release.
Debian 10 (Stretch) was released! Yay!
Moved abcmidi from experimental to unstable, adding an autopkgtest at the same time.
Moved node-concat-stream from experimental to unstable. During the process I had to take care of the intermediate upload to stretch (on a separate branch) because of the freeze.
Moved node-tmp to unstable from experimental.
Moved node-os-tmpdir from experimental to unstable.
Filed a removal bug for creepy, which seems to be unmaintained upstream these days. Sent my unfinished Qt4 to Qt5 porting patches upstream just in case!
Uploaded node-object-inspect to experimental to check the reverse dependencies, then moved it to unstable. Then a new upstream version came out which is now in experimental waiting for a retest of reverse dependencies.
Uploaded the latest version of gramps (4.2.6).
Uploaded a new version of node-cross-spawn to experimental.
Discovered that I had successfully completed the DD application process and I was now a Debian Developer. I celebrated by uploading the Debian Multimedia Blends package to the NEW queue, which I was not able to do before!
Tweaked and uploaded the node-seq package (with an RC fix) which had been sitting there because I did not have DM rights to the package. It is not an important package anyhow, as it is just one of the many dependencies that need to be packaged for Browserify.
Packaged and uploaded the latest node-isarray directly to unstable, as the changes seemed harmless.
Prepared and uploaded the latest node-js-yaml to experimental.
Did an update to the Node packaging Manual now that we are allowed to use node as the executable in Debian instead of nodejs which caused us to do a lot of patching in the past to get node packages working in Debian.

Ubuntu

Did a freeze exception bug for ubuntustudio-controls, but we did not manage to get it sponsored before the Ubuntu Studio Zesty 17.04 release.
Investigated why Ardour was not migrating from zesty-proposed, but I couldn t be sure of what was holding it up. After getting some help from the Developer s mailing list, I prepared no change rebuild of pd-aubio which was sponsored by Steve Langasek after a little tweak. This did the trick.
Wrote to the Ubuntu Studio list asking for support for testing the Ubuntu Studio Zesty release, as I would be on holiday in the lead up to the release. When I got back, I found the release had gone smoothly. Thanks team!
Worked on some blueprints for the next Ubuntu Studio Artful release.
As Set no longer has enough spare time to work on Ubuntu Studio, we had a meeting on IRC to decide what to do. We decided that we should set up a Council like Xubuntu have. I drafted an announcement, but we still have not gone live with it yet. Maybe someone will have read this far and give us a push (or help).
Did a quick test of Len s ubuntustudio-controls re-write (at least the GUI bits). We better get a move on if we want this to be part of Artful!
Tested ISO for Ubuntu Studio Xenial 16.04.3 point release, and updated the release notes.
Started working on a merge of Qjackctl using git-ubuntu for the first time. Had some issues getting going, so I asked the authors for some advice.

Daniel Silverstone: F/LOSS activity, July 2017

Once again, my focus was on Gitano, which we're working toward a 1.1 for. We had another one of our Gitano developer days which was attended by Richard maw and myself. You are invited to read the wiki page but a summary of what happened, which directly involved me, is:

Once again, we reviewed our current task state
We had a good discussion about our code of conduct including adopting a small change from upstream to improve matters
I worked on, and submitted a patch for, improving nested error message reports in Lace.
I reviewed and merged some work from Richard about pattern centralisation
I responded to comments on a number of in-flight series Richard had reviewed for me.
We discussed our plans for 1.1 and agreed that we'll be skipping a developer day in August because so much of it is consumed by DebConf and so on.

Other than that, related to Gitano during July I:

Submitted some code series before the developer day covering Gall cleanups and hook support in Gitano.
Reviewed and merged some more Makefile updates from Richard Ipsum
Reviewed and merged a Supple fix for environment cleardown from Richard Ipsum
Fixed an issue in one of the Makefiles which made it harder to build with dh-lua
I began work in earnest on Gitano CI, preparing a lot of scripts and support to sit around Jenkins (for now) for CIing packaging etc for Gitano and Debian
I began work on a system branch concept for Gitano CI which will let us handle the CI of branches in the repos, even if they cross repos.

I don't think I've done much non-Gitano F/LOSS work in July, but I am now in Montr al for debconf 2017 so hopefully more to say next month.

Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo: News on Debian on apexqtmo

I had been using my Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G for almost three years when I decided to get a new phone. I would use this new phone for daily tasks and take the chance to get a new model for hacking in the future. My apexqtmo would still be my companion and would now be more available for real hacking. And so it also happened that its power button got stuck. It was not the first time, but now it would happen every so often, and would require me to disassemble it. So I managed to remove the plastic button and leave it with a hole so I could press the button with a screwdriver or a paperclip. That was the excuse I needed to get it to running Debian only. Though it's now always plugged on my laptop, I got the chance to hack on it on my scarce free time. As I managed to get a kernel I built myself running on it, I started fixing things like enabling devtmpfs. I didn't insist much on running systemd, though, and kept with System V. The Xorg issues were either on the server or the client, depending on which client I ran. I decided to give a chance to running the Android userspace on a chroot, but gave up after some work to get some firmware loaded. I managed to get the ALSA controls right after saving them inside a chroot on my CyanogenMod system. Then, restoring them on Debian allowed to play songs. Unfortunately, it seems I broke the audio jack when disassembling it. Otherwise, it would have been a great portable audio player. I even wrote a small program that would allow me to control mpd by swiping on the touchscreen. Then, as Debian release approached, I decided to investigate the framebuffer issue closely. I ended finding out that it was really a bug in the driver, and after fixing it, the X server and client crashes were gone. It was beautiful to get some desktop environment running with the right colors, get a calculator started and really using the phone as a mobile device. There are two lessons or findings here for me. The first one is that the current environments are really lacking. Even something like GPE can't work. The buttons are tiny, scrollbars are still the only way for scrolling, some of the time. No automatic virtual keyboards. So, there needs to be some investing in the existing environments, and maybe even the development of new environments for these kinds of devices. This was something I expected somehow, but it's still disappointing to know that we had so much of those developed in the past and now gone. I really miss Maemo. Running something like Qtopia would mean grabing a very old unmaintained software not available in Debian. There is still matchbox, but it's as subpar as the others I tested. The second lesson is that building a userspace to run on old kernels will still hit the problem of broken drivers. In my particular case, unless I wrote code for using Ion instead of the framebuffer, I would have had that problem. Or it would require me to add code to xorg-xserver that is not appropriate. Or fix the kernel drivers of available kernel sourcecodes. But this does not scale much more than doing the right thing and adding upstream support for these devices. So, I decided it was time I started working on upstream support for my device. I have it in progress and may send some upstream patches soon. I have USB and MMC/SDcard working fine. DRM is still a challenge, but thanks to Rob Clark, it's something I expect to get working soon, and after that, I would certainly celebrate. Maybe even consider starting the work on other devices a little sooner. Trying to review my post on GNU on smartphones, here is where I would put some of the status of my device and some extra notes. On Halium I am really glad people started this project. This was one of the things I criticized: that though Ubuntu Phone and FirefoxOS built on Android userspace, they were not easily portable to many devices out there. But as I am looking for a more pure GNU experience, let's call it that, Halium does not help much in that direction. But I'd like to see it flourish and allow people to use more OSes on more devices. Unfortunately, it suffers from similar problems as the strategy I was trying to go with. If you have a device with a very old kernel, you won't be able to run some of the latest userspace, even with Android userspace help. So, lots of devices would be left unsupported, unless we start working on some upstream support. On RYF Hardware My device is one of the worst out there. It's a modem that has a peripherical CPU. Much has already been said about Qualcomm chips being some of the least freedom-friendly. Ironically, it's some with the best upstream support, as far as I found out while doing this upstreaming work. Guess we'll have to wait for opencores, openrisc and risc-v to catch up here. Diversity Though I have been experimenting with Debian, the upstream work would sure benefit lots of other OSes out there, mainly GNU+Linux based ones, but also other non-GNU Linux based ones. Not so much for other kernels. On other options After the demise of Ubuntu Phone, I am glad to see UBports catching up. I hope the project is sustainable and produce more releases for more devices. Rooting This needs documentation. Most of the procedures rely on booting a recovery system, which means we are already past the root requirement. We simply boot our own system, then. However, for some debugging strategies, getting root on the OEM system is useful. So, try to get root on your system, but beware of malware out there. Booting Most of these devices will have their bootloaders in there. They may be unlocked, allowing unsigned kernels to be booted. Replacing these bootloaders is still going to be a challenge for another future phase. Though adding a second bootloader there, one that is freedom respecting, and that allows more control on that booting step to the user is something possible once you have some good upstream support. One could either use kexec for that, or try to use the same device tree for U-Boot, and use the knowledge of the device drivers for Linux on writing drivers for U-Boot, GRUB or Libreboot. Installation If you have root on your OEM system, this is something that could be worked on. Otherwise, there is magic-device-tool, whose approach is one that could be used. Kernels While I am working on adding Linux upstream support for my device, it would be wonderful to see more kernels supporting those gadgets. Hopefully, some of the device driver writing and reverse engineering could help with that, though I am not too much optimistic. But there is hope. Basic kernel drivers Adding the basic support, like USB and MMC, after clocks, gpios, regulators and what not, is the first step to a long road. But it would allow using the device as a board computer, under better control of the user. Hopefully, lots of eletronic garbage out there would have some use as control gadgets. Instead of buying a new board, just grab your old phone and put it to some nice use. Sensors, input devices, LEDs There are usually easy too. Some sensors may depend on your modem or some userspace code that is not that easily reverse engineered. But others would just require some device tree work, or some small input driver. Graphics Here, things may get complicated. Even basic video output is something I have some trouble with. Thanks to some other people's work, I have hope at least for my device. And using the vendor's linux source code, some framebuffer should be possible, even some DRM driver. But OpenGL or other 3D acceleration support requires much more work than that, and, at this moment, it's not something I am counting on. I am thankful for the work lots of people have been doing on this area, nonetheless. Wireless Be it Wifi or Bluetooth, things get ugly here. The vendor driver might be available. Rewriting it would take a long time. Even then, it would most likely require some non-free firmware loading. Using USB OTG here might be an option. Modem/GSM The work of the Replicant folks on that is what gives me some hope that it might be possible to get this working. Something I would leave to after I have a good interface experience in my hands. GPS Problem is similar to the Modem/GSM one, as some code lives in userspace, sometimes talking to the modem is a requirement to get GPS access, etc. Shells This is where I would like to see new projects, even if they work on current software to get them more friendly to these form factors. I consider doing some work there, though that's not really my area of expertise. Next steps For me, my next steps are getting what I have working upstream, keep working on DRM support, packaging GPE, then experimenting with some compositor code. In the middle of that, trying to get some other devices started. But documenting some of my work is something I realized I need to do more often, and this post is some try on that.

Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo: News on Debian on apexqtmo

I had been using my Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G for almost three years when I decided to get a new phone. I would use this new phone for daily tasks and take the chance to get a new model for hacking in the future. My apexqtmo would still be my companion and would now be more available for real hacking. And so it also happened that its power button got stuck. It was not the first time, but now it would happen every so often, and would require me to disassemble it. So I managed to remove the plastic button and leave it with a hole so I could press the button with a screwdriver or a paperclip. That was the excuse I needed to get it to running Debian only. Though it's now always plugged on my laptop, I got the chance to hack on it on my scarce free time. As I managed to get a kernel I built myself running on it, I started fixing things like enabling devtmpfs. I didn't insist much on running systemd, though, and kept with System V. The Xorg issues were either on the server or the client, depending on which client I ran. I decided to give a chance to running the Android userspace on a chroot, but gave up after some work to get some firmware loaded. I managed to get the ALSA controls right after saving them inside a chroot on my CyanogenMod system. Then, restoring them on Debian allowed to play songs. Unfortunately, it seems I broke the audio jack when disassembling it. Otherwise, it would have been a great portable audio player. I even wrote a small program that would allow me to control mpd by swiping on the touchscreen. Then, as Debian release approached, I decided to investigate the framebuffer issue closely. I ended finding out that it was really a bug in the driver, and after fixing it, the X server and client crashes were gone. It was beautiful to get some desktop environment running with the right colors, get a calculator started and really using the phone as a mobile device. There are two lessons or findings here for me. The first one is that the current environments are really lacking. Even something like GPE can't work. The buttons are tiny, scrollbars are still the only way for scrolling, some of the time. No automatic virtual keyboards. So, there needs to be some investing in the existing environments, and maybe even the development of new environments for these kinds of devices. This was something I expected somehow, but it's still disappointing to know that we had so much of those developed in the past and now gone. I really miss Maemo. Running something like Qtopia would mean grabing a very old unmaintained software not available in Debian. There is still matchbox, but it's as subpar as the others I tested. The second lesson is that building a userspace to run on old kernels will still hit the problem of broken drivers. In my particular case, unless I wrote code for using Ion instead of the framebuffer, I would have had that problem. Or it would require me to add code to xorg-xserver that is not appropriate. Or fix the kernel drivers of available kernel sourcecodes. But this does not scale much more than doing the right thing and adding upstream support for these devices. So, I decided it was time I started working on upstream support for my device. I have it in progress and may send some upstream patches soon. I have USB and MMC/SDcard working fine. DRM is still a challenge, but thanks to Rob Clark, it's something I expect to get working soon, and after that, I would certainly celebrate. Maybe even consider starting the work on other devices a little sooner. Trying to review my post on GNU on smartphones, here is where I would put some of the status of my device and some extra notes. On Halium I am really glad people started this project. This was one of the things I criticized: that though Ubuntu Phone and FirefoxOS built on Android userspace, they were not easily portable to many devices out there. But as I am looking for a more pure GNU experience, let's call it that, Halium does not help much in that direction. But I'd like to see it flourish and allow people to use more OSes on more devices. Unfortunately, it suffers from similar problems as the strategy I was trying to go with. If you have a device with a very old kernel, you won't be able to run some of the latest userspace, even with Android userspace help. So, lots of devices would be left unsupported, unless we start working on some upstream support. On RYF Hardware My device is one of the worst out there. It's a modem that has a peripherical CPU. Much has already been said about Qualcomm chips being some of the least freedom-friendly. Ironically, it's some with the best upstream support, as far as I found out while doing this upstreaming work. Guess we'll have to wait for opencores, openrisc and risc-v to catch up here. Diversity Though I have been experimenting with Debian, the upstream work would sure benefit lots of other OSes out there, mainly GNU+Linux based ones, but also other non-GNU Linux based ones. Not so much for other kernels. On other options After the demise of Ubuntu Phone, I am glad to see UBports catching up. I hope the project is sustainable and produce more releases for more devices. Rooting This needs documentation. Most of the procedures rely on booting a recovery system, which means we are already past the root requirement. We simply boot our own system, then. However, for some debugging strategies, getting root on the OEM system is useful. So, try to get root on your system, but beware of malware out there. Booting Most of these devices will have their bootloaders in there. They may be unlocked, allowing unsigned kernels to be booted. Replacing these bootloaders is still going to be a challenge for another future phase. Though adding a second bootloader there, one that is freedom respecting, and that allows more control on that booting step to the user is something possible once you have some good upstream support. One could either use kexec for that, or try to use the same device tree for U-Boot, and use the knowledge of the device drivers for Linux on writing drivers for U-Boot, GRUB or Libreboot. Installation If you have root on your OEM system, this is something that could be worked on. Otherwise, there is magic-device-tool, whose approach is one that could be used. Kernels While I am working on adding Linux upstream support for my device, it would be wonderful to see more kernels supporting those gadgets. Hopefully, some of the device driver writing and reverse engineering could help with that, though I am not too much optimistic. But there is hope. Basic kernel drivers Adding the basic support, like USB and MMC, after clocks, gpios, regulators and what not, is the first step to a long road. But it would allow using the device as a board computer, under better control of the user. Hopefully, lots of eletronic garbage out there would have some use as control gadgets. Instead of buying a new board, just grab your old phone and put it to some nice use. Sensors, input devices, LEDs There are usually easy too. Some sensors may depend on your modem or some userspace code that is not that easily reverse engineered. But others would just require some device tree work, or some small input driver. Graphics Here, things may get complicated. Even basic video output is something I have some trouble with. Thanks to some other people's work, I have hope at least for my device. And using the vendor's linux source code, some framebuffer should be possible, even some DRM driver. But OpenGL or other 3D acceleration support requires much more work than that, and, at this moment, it's not something I am counting on. I am thankful for the work lots of people have been doing on this area, nonetheless. Wireless Be it Wifi or Bluetooth, things get ugly here. The vendor driver might be available. Rewriting it would take a long time. Even then, it would most likely require some non-free firmware loading. Using USB OTG here might be an option. Modem/GSM The work of the Replicant folks on that is what gives me some hope that it might be possible to get this working. Something I would leave to after I have a good interface experience in my hands. GPS Problem is similar to the Modem/GSM one, as some code lives in userspace, sometimes talking to the modem is a requirement to get GPS access, etc. Shells This is where I would like to see new projects, even if they work on current software to get them more friendly to these form factors. I consider doing some work there, though that's not really my area of expertise. Next steps For me, my next steps are getting what I have working upstream, keep working on DRM support, packaging GPE, then experimenting with some compositor code. In the middle of that, trying to get some other devices started. But documenting some of my work is something I realized I need to do more often, and this post is some try on that.

John Goerzen: First Experiences with Stretch

I ve done my first upgrades to Debian stretch at this point. The results have been overall good. On the laptop my kids use, I helped my 10-year-old do it, and it worked flawlessly. On my workstation, I got a kernel panic on boot. Hmm. Unfortunately, my system has to use the nv drivers, which leaves me with an 80 25 text console. It took some finagling (break=init in grub, then manually insmoding the appropriate stuff based on modules.dep for nouveau), but finally I got a console so I could see what was breaking. It appeared that init was crashing because it couldn t find liblz4. A little digging shows that liblz4 is in /usr, and /usr wasn t mounted. I ve filed the bug on systemd-sysv for this. I run root on ZFS, and further digging revealed that I had datasets named like this:

tank/hostname-1/ROOT
tank/hostname-1/usr
tank/hostname-1/var

This used to be fine. The mountpoint property of the usr dataset put it at /usr without incident. But it turns out that this won t work now, unless I set ZFS_INITRD_ADDITIONAL_DATASETS in /etc/default/zfs for some reason. So I renamed them so usr was under ROOT, and then the system booted. Then I ran samba not liking something in my bind interfaces line (to be fair, it did still say eth0 instead of br0). rpcbind was failing in postinst, though a reboot seems to have helped that. More annoying was that I had trouble logging into my system because resolv.conf was left empty (despite dns-* entries in /etc/network/interfaces and the presence of resolvconf). I eventually repaired that, and found that it kept removing my search line. Eventually I removed resolvconf. Then mariadb s postinst was silently failing. I eventually discovered it was sending info to syslog (odd), and /etc/init.d/apparmor teardown let it complete properly. It seems like there may have been an outdated /etc/apparmor.d/cache/usr.sbin.mysql out there for some reason. Then there was XFCE. I use it with xmonad, and the session startup was really wonky. I had to zap my sessions, my panel config, etc. and start anew. I am still not entirely sure I have it right, but I at do have a usable system now.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: nanotime 0.2.0

A new version of the nanotime package for working with nanosecond timestamps just arrived on CRAN. nanotime uses the RcppCCTZ package for (efficient) high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, and the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Thanks to a metric ton of work by Leonardo Silvestri, the package now uses S4 classes internally allowing for greater consistency of operations on nanotime objects.

Changes in version 0.2.0 (2017-06-22)

Rewritten in S4 to provide more robust operations (#17 by Leonardo)

Ensure tz="" is treated as unset (Leonardo in #20)

Added format and tz arguments to nanotime, format, print (#22 by Leonardo and Dirk)

Ensure printing respect options()$max.print, ensure names are kept with vector (#23 by Leonardo)

Correct summary() by defining names<- (Leonardo in #25 fixing #24)

Report error on operations that are meaningful for type; handled NA, NaN, Inf, -Inf correctly (Leonardo in #27 fixing #26)

We also have a diff to the previous version thanks to CRANberries. More details and examples are at the nanotime page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 106 in Stretch cycle

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday April 30 and Saturday May 6 2017: Past and upcoming events Between May 5th-7th the Reproducible Builds Hackathon 2017 took place in Hamburg, Germany. On May 6th Mattia Rizzolo gave a talk on Reproducible Builds at DUCC-IT 17 in Vicenza, Italy. On May 13th Chris Lamb will give a talk on Reproducible Builds at OSCAL 2017 in Tirana, Albania. Media coverage

Gunnar Wolf published an article in Spanish entitled "Construcciones Reproducibles".

Toolchain development and fixes

Ximin updated his R patch to fix a few FTBFS and now we have 463/478 reproducible R packages. For more details, see his detailed write-up on this blog.
Holger rebuilt dpkg, gcc-6 and r-base for our experimental toolchain for unstable on arm64, i386 and armhf.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Chris Lamb:

#861608 filed against sbt.
#861672 filed against libwibble.
#861756 filed against pd-pdstring.
#861770 filed against fbreader.
#861773 filed against armagetronad.
#861893 filed against ironic.
#861896 filed against manila.
#861955 filed against canna.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 93 package reviews have been added, 12 have been updated and 98 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. The following issues have been added:

2 issue types have been updated:

The following issues have been removed:

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

Chris Lamb (3)

diffoscope development

Chris Lamb:

strip-nondeterminism development

Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
- make get_normalizer_by_name O(1)
- only call get_normalizer_by_name once

This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen and Ximin Luo & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Russ Allbery: Review: Neverness

Review: Neverness, by David Zindell

Publisher:	Bantam Spectra
Copyright:	May 1988
Printing:	July 1989
ISBN:	0-553-27903-3
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	552

Mallory Ringess is a Pilot, one of the people who can guide a lightship through interstellar space from inside the dark cocoon and biotech interface that allows visualization of the mathematics of interstellar travel. At the start of the book, he's young, arrogant, impulsive, and has a deeply unhealthy relationship with Leopold Soli, the Lord Pilot and supposedly his uncle by marriage (although they share a remarkable physical resemblance). An encounter with his uncle in a bar provokes a rash promise, and Ringess finds himself promising to attempt to map the Solid State Entity in search of the Elder Eddas, a secret of life from the mythical Ieldra that might lead to mankind's immortality. The opening of Neverness is Ringess's initial voyage and brash search, in which he proves to be a capable mathematician who can navigate a region of space twisted and deformed by becoming part of a transcendent machine intelligence. The knowledge he comes away with, though, is scarcely more coherent than the hints Soli relates at the start of the story: the secret of mankind is somehow hidden in its deepest past. That, in turn, provokes a deeply bizarre trip into the ice surrounding his home city of Neverness to attempt to steal biological material from people who have recreated themselves as Neanderthals. Beyond that point, I would say that things get even weirder, but weird still implies some emotional connection with the story. I think a more accurate description is that the book gets more incoherently mystical, more hopelessly pretentious, and more depressingly enthralled by childish drama. It's the sort of thing that one writes if one is convinced that the Oedipal complex is the height of subtle characterization. I loathed this book. I started loathing this book partway through Ringess's trip through the Solid State Entity, when Zindell's prose reached for transcendent complexity, tripped over its own shoelaces, and fell headlong into overwrought babbling. I continued reading every page because there's a perverse pleasure in hate-reading a book one dislikes this intensely, and because I wanted to write a review on the firm foundation of having endured the entire experience. The paperback edition I have has a pull quote from Orson Scott Card on the cover, which includes the phrase "excellent hard science fiction." I'm not sure what book Card read, because if this is hard science fiction, Lord of the Rings is paranormal romance. Even putting aside the idea that one travels through interstellar space by proving mathematical theorems in artificially dilated time (I don't think Zindell really understands what a proof is or why you write one), there's the whole business with stopping time with one's mind, reading other people's minds, and remembering one's own DNA. The technology, such as it is, makes considerably less sense than Star Wars. The hard SF requirement to keep technology consistent with extrapolated science is nowhere to be found here. The back-cover quote from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is a bit more on-target: "Reminiscent of Gene Wolfe's New Sun novels... really comes to life among the intrigues of Neverness." This is indeed reminiscent of Gene Wolfe, in that it wouldn't surprise me at all if Zindell fell in love with the sense of antiquity, strangeness, and hints of understood technology that Wolfe successfully creates and attempted to emulate Wolfe in his first novel. Sadly, Zindell isn't Wolfe. Almost no one is, which is why attempting to emulate the extremely difficult feat Wolfe pulls off in the Book of the New Sun in your first novel is not a good idea. The results aren't pretty. There is something to be said for resplendent descriptions, rich with detail and ornamental prose. That something is "please use sparingly and with an eye to the emotional swings of the novel." Wolfe does not try to write most of a novel that way, which is what makes those moments of description so effective. Wolfe is also much better at making his mysteries and allusions subtle and unobtrusive, rather than having the first-person protagonist beat the reader over the head with them for pages at a time. This is a case where showing is probably better than telling. Let me quote a bit of description from the start of the book:

She shimmers, my city, she shimmers. She is said to be the most beautiful of all the cities of the Civilized Worlds, more beautiful even than Parpallaix or the cathedral cities of Vesper. To the west, pushing into the green sea like a huge, jewel-studded sleeve of city, the fragile obsidian cloisters and hospices of the Farsider's Quarter gleamed like black glass mirrors. Straight ahead as we skated, I saw the frothy churn of the Sound and their whitecaps of breakers crashing against the cliffs of North Beach and above the entire city, veined with purple and glazed with snow and ice, Waaskel and Attakel rose up like vast pyramids against the sky. Beneath the half-ring of extinct volcanoes (Urkel, I should mention, is the southernmost peak, and though less magnificent than the others, it has a conical symmetry that some find pleasing) the towers and spires of the Academy scattered the dazzling false winter light so that the whole of the Old City sparkled.

That's less than half of that paragraph, and the entire book is written like that, even in the middle of conversations. Endless, constant words piled on words about absolutely everything, whether important or not, whether emotionally significant or not. And much of it isn't even description, but philosophical ponderings that are desperately trying to seem profound. Here's another bit:

Although I knew I had never seen her before, I felt as if I had known her all my life. I was instantly in love with her, not, of course, as one loves another human being, but as a wanderer might love a new ocean or a gorgeous snowy peak he has glimpsed for the first time. I was practically struck dumb by her calmness and her beauty, so I said the first stupid thing which came to mind. "Welcome to Neverness," I told her.

Now, I should be fair: some people like this kind of description, or at least have more tolerance for it than I do. But that brings me to the second problem: there isn't a single truly likable character in this entire novel. Ringess, the person telling us this whole story, is a spoiled man-child, the sort of deeply immature and insecure person who attempts to compensate through bluster, impetuousness, and refusing to ever admit that he made a mistake or needed to learn something. He spends a good portion of the book, particularly the deeply bizarre and off-putting sections with the fake Neanderthals, attempting to act out some sort of stereotyped toxic masculinity and wallowing in negative emotions. Soli is an arrogant, abusive asshole from start to finish. Katherine, Ringess's love interest, is a seer who has had her eyes removed to see the future (I cannot express how disturbing I found Zindell's descriptions of this), has bizarre and weirdly sexualized reactions to the future she never explains, and leaves off the ends of all of her sentences, which might be be the most pointlessly irritating dialogue quirk I've seen in a novel. And Ringess's mother is a man-hating feminist from a separatist culture who turns into a master manipulator (I'm starting to see why Card liked this book). I at least really wanted to like Bardo, Ringess's closest friend, who has a sort of crude loyalty and unwillingness to get pulled too deep into the philosophical quicksand lurking underneath everything in this novel. Alas, Zindell insists on constantly describing Bardo's odious eating, belching, and sexual habits every time he's on the page, thus reducing him to the disgusting buffoon who gets drunk a lot and has irritating verbal ticks. About the only person I could stand by the end of the book was Justine, who at least seems vaguely sensible (and who leaves the person who abuses her), but she's too much of a non-entity to carry sustained interest. (There is potential here for a deeply scathing and vicious retelling of this story from Justine's point of view, focusing on the ways she was belittled, abused, and ignored, but I think Zindell was entirely unaware of why that would be so effective.) Oh, and there's lots of gore and horrific injury and lovingly-described torture, because of course there is. And that brings me back to the second half of that St. Louis Post-Dispatch review quote: "... really comes to life among the intrigues of Neverness." I would love to know what was hiding behind the ellipses in this pull quote, because this half-sentence is not wrong. Insofar as Neverness has any real appeal, it's in the intrigues of the city of Neverness and in the political structure that rules it. What this quote omits is that these intrigues start around page 317, more than halfway through the novel. That's about the point where faux-Wolfe starts mixing with late-career Frank Herbert and we get poet-assassins, some revelations about the leader of the Pilot culture, and some more concrete explanations of what this mess of a book is about. Unfortunately, you have to read through the huge and essentially meaningless Neanderthal scenes to get there, scenes that have essentially nothing to do with the interesting content of this book. (Everything that motivates them turns out to be completely irrelevant to the plot and useless for the characters.) The last 40% of the book is almost passable, and characters I cared about might have even made it enjoyable. Still, a couple of remaining problems detract heavily, chief among them the lack of connection of the great revelation of the story to, well, anything in the story. We learn at the very start of the novel that the stars of the Vild are mysteriously exploding, and much of the novel is driven by uncovering an explanation and solution. The characters do find an explanation, but not through any investigation. Ringess is simply told what is happening, in a wad of exposition, as a reward for something else entirely. It's weirdly disconnected from and irrelevant to everything else in the story. (There are some faint connections to the odd technological rules that the Pilot society lives under, but Zindell doesn't even draw attention to those.) The political intrigue in Neverness is similar: it appears out of nowhere more than halfway through the book, with no dramatic foundation for the motives of the person who has been keeping most of the secrets. And the final climax of the political machinations involves a bunch of mystical nonsense masquerading as science, and more of the Neanderthal bullshit that ruins the first half of the book. This is a thoroughly bad book: poorly plotted, poorly written, clotted and pretentious in style, and full of sociopaths and emotionally stunted children. I read the whole thing because I'm immensely stubborn and make poor life choices, but I was saying the eight deadly words ("I don't care what happens to these people") by a hundred pages in. Don't emulate my bad decisions. (Somehow, this novel was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke award in 1990. What on earth could they possibly have been thinking?) Neverness is a stand-alone novel, but the ending sets up a subsequent trilogy that I have no intention of reading. Followed by The Broken God. Rating: 2 out of 10

Dirk Eddelbuettel: nanotime 0.1.2

A new minor version of the nanotime package for working with nanosecond timestamps arrived yesterday on CRAN. nanotime uses the RcppCCTZ package for (efficient) high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, and the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. This release just arranges things neatly before Leonardo Silvestri and I may shake things up with a possible shift to doing it all in S4 as we may need the added rigour for nanotime object operations for use in his ztsdb project.

Changes in version 0.1.2 (2017-03-27)

The as.integer64 function is now exported as well.

We also have a diff to the previous version thanks to CRANberries. More details and examples are at the nanotime page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities February 2017

Changes

gplenforced.org: mention copyleft.org, FSF and gpl-violations.org

https-everywhere: fix & merge Debian updates

Spelling:

iotop: alignement

codespell: pacakge, intregral, droppend, enforcmement, bood, everythin, temporarly, claaes, depricated, pluign(s), paramater(s), minimun, differrent, dekstop, impresive, mangementt, pusehd, pres, embdedded, captable, verifty(ing), alignement

lintian: droppend, enforcmement, bood, everythin, temporarly, claaes, pluign(s), differrent, debiab, dekstop, impresive, mangementt, pusehd, pres, embdedded, captable, verifty(ing), alignement

Debian wiki: AutomateBackports, binNMU, CopyrightReview (Tools), CristianGreco, DebianArt (RequestArtwork), DebianGeoMirror, DebianLocations, DebianLogo, DebianSecurity/AdvisoryCreation/SecFull, Derivatives/Census (Armbian, Matriux), Exploits, gsoc, GSoC, LTS/Team, Mentors/Review (1, 2), PaulWise/InterestingSoftware, PlanetDebian, qa.debian.org, Services/MentorsDebianNet, Statistics, Teams/Publicity (Identica, micronews, Release), Teams/Webmaster (TODO), Year

DebConf wiki: Timeline (DebConf16, DebConf17)

Wikipedia: BugSat_1, Message-ID, PaulWise

Debian website: Unix line endings, merged release team patches for stretch/buster, update links to removed pages (1 2 3 4)

Debian QA: clang build logs (merged PTS patch, re-enabled & fixed in tracker)

Debian security tracker: CVE updates (1, 2), update mirror, fix domain typo, avoid hard-coding years

Debian nagios: update mirror-isc.d.o upstream

Debian DNS: fix snapshot backup issue

Debian package uploads: nvme-cli 1.0-3~bpo8+1, libesedb 20170121-2~bpo8+1

Issues

Release-critical bugs in needrestart-session, dnssec-trigger

Fix exit status in ipmievd

TLS for links in bugs.debian.org emails, planet.gnome.org

Password length in AbiSource Bugzilla

Disabling ReportPage in apt-cacher-ng: wrong comment and breaks the cron job

Features in adequate and git/github (light-weight pull requests)

Review

Spam: reported 5 Debian bug reports and 158 Debian mailing list posts

Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month

Debian packages: reviewed and sponsored gtranscribe 0.7.1-2

Debian screenshots:

approved fbreader unity openlp wadc bosixnet-webui (2) ardour arc-theme terminix kget okular sl synergy musique screenfetch mercurial-crecord git-crecord libglpk-java rolo streamtuner2 muon limesuite endless-sky spectrwm

approved deletion of sshpass (website screenshot)

rejected reaver/pixiewps/golang (just a picture of the help output), git (Android browser screenshot with rude confused title), marble (not a screenshot), libcanberra0-dbg (no screenshot present)

Administration

Debian: do the samhain dance, ask for new local contacts at one site, ask local admins to reset one machine, powercycle 2 dead machines, redirect 1 user to the support channels, redirect 1 user to a service admin, redirect 1 spam reporter to the right mechanisms, investigate mail logs for a missing bug report, ping bugs-search.d.o service admin about moving off glinka and remove data, poke cdimage-search.d.o service admin about moving off glinka, update a cron job on denis.d.o for the rename of letsencrypt.sh to dehydrated, debug planet.d.o issue and remove stray cron job lock file, check if ftp is used on a couple of security.d.o mirrors, discuss storage upgrade for LeaseWeb for snapshot.d.o/deriv.d.n/etc, investigate SSD SMART error and ignore the unknown attribute, ask 9 users to restart their processes, investigate apt-get update failure in nagios, swapoff/swapon a swap file to drain it, restart/disable some failed services, help restore the backup server, debug stretch /dev/log issue,

Debian QA: deploy merged PTS/tracker patches,

Debian wiki: answer 1 IP-blocked VPN user, pinged 1 user on IRC about their bouncing mail, disabled 4 accounts due to bouncing mail, redirect 1 person to documentation/lists, whitelist 5 email addresses, forward 1 password reset token, killed 1 spammer account, reverted 1 spammer edit,

Debian mentors: security upgrades, check which email a user signed up with

Openmoko: security upgrades, daemon restarts, reboot

Debian derivatives

Turned off the census cron job because it ran out of disk space

Update Armbian sources.list

Ping siduction folks about updating their sources.list

Start a discussion about DebConf17

Notify the derivatives based on jessie or older that stretch is frozen

Invite Rebellin Linux (again)

Sponsors The libesedb Debian backport was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Search Results: "ardo"

15 March 2020

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Changes in version 0.1.2 (2017-03-27) The as.integer64 function is now exported as well.

1 March 2017

Sponsors The libesedb Debian backport was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Changes in version 0.1.2 (2017-03-27)

The `as.integer64` function is now exported as well.